Spombing maggots by the gallon for Tench & Bream

After our fairly successful session at Higham Farm last year, Shane and I decided on a return trip this Spring, again for 24 hours and again targeting the resident tench.

Shane had hatched a plan of attack and I liked it.  I really liked it.  This time we would fish on the Specimen Lake, which can only be fished on a 24 hour ticket.  Because of this, it tends to only attract carp anglers so the numerous other species resident in the lake only ever see the bank when they pick up a disgruntled carper's bait!  Specimen tench and bream were definitely on the cards, plus who knows what large roach and perch could lurk in there.

Besides fishing this lake, our approach was a little unorthodox too.  Rather than simply using scaled-back carp tactics, we would go armed with a couple of gallons of maggots each and fish positively by feeding aggresively - by introducing a large bed of maggots via a spomb, then topping the swims up when necessary.

I chose to hair rig a mixture of buoyant Drennan imitation maggots and live maggots to create a balanced Medusa bait designed to hover just above the lake bed, without any putty of shot to anchor it. 

To create the maggot medusa I threaded an imitation maggot lengthways onto the hair, followed by a small tied-on rig ring.  Then I threaded a mixture of real and fake maggots onto some 4lb mono with an eyed needle, passed the needle through the rig ring and then tied it off.  This is a really tidy way to attach numerous maggots to a hair.  Some anglers prefer to fish with just a couple of fake maggots but in this instance I wanted a big bait (I wouldn't have complained too much if one of the specimen lake's "nuisance fish" carp picked up my bait!) that would stand out over the large bed of loosefed maggots.

My balanced maggot medusa rig ready to fish on the helicopter rig setup.

My medusa rig for the margin rod, clearly showing the fake maggot on the hair and two fake maggots tied on with the real ones.  Also note this bait is glugged & ready to cast.

Shane got off work earlier than I did and had prepared the swims by the time I arrived.  With only a couple of hours daylight left I quickly got settled in and cast out.  I could have gone with a swimfeeder to introduce free offerings close to my hookbait, but I opted instead for PVA stockings stuffed with maggots.

My two baited spots were a marginal corner with overhanging bushes to my right, and at the bottom of the drop-off from an island straight in front of me.  

For the margin rig I opted for a free-running rig with an Avid Carp PVA bag clip attached to the lead eye:

PVA stocking full of maggots, attached to the lead eye via an Avid Carp PVA clip

Free-running leger rig ready to flick into the margin

For the island rig I setup an inline lead to be fished helicopter-style, with a PVA bag clip attached to what would be the hooklink swivel if it was fished inline:

My adapted in-line lead setup to fish helicopter style.  This was a really effective rig, both as an anti-tagle rig and as a fish-catching rig.

The helicopter rig loaded up and ready to cast out.

Things started well for me, as I quickly landed 2 bream - including a new PB of 7lb 15oz - and a perch before sunset, then everything went quiet.

A good bream from Higham Farm specimen lake - a very promising start...

I got plenty of sleep because my alarms barely sounded all night. I did recast the rigs with fresh maggot stockings a couple of times, to keep some bait going in.

Just before daybreak I was awoken by a screaming run on the margin rod. After a gutsy fight around the tree roots and low branches to my right, I got the shakes. I could see I was attached to a nice tench which would easily break my very modest PB. I finally had control of the fish and was guiding it across the surface towards my landing net when everything went slack! Hook pull! Damn it!

I swore quietly at myself for letting a golden opportunity for a PB tench slip through my fingers. Then I snapped myself out of my navel gazing and hastily rebaited the rod (I also changed the hook for a different pattern, just in case) and dropped the rig back in the marginal spot. I didn't have to wait long for this rod to scream away again and - although not a PB - I soon had a lovely tench on the bank.

A lovely tench which almost made up for the bigger one I lost earlier.

That was it for the margin rod, no more bites were forthcoming. But in the first hour of daylight the other rod began to see some action again. A shoal of bream had moved back over the bait - almost 12 hours after they last gave me a bite - and I proceeded to land a couple from in front of the island in a frantic hour before things went dead for the whole day.
 

A pair of decent bream from a small specimen carp lake

I was fishing on a 24 hour ticket and I knew I would be leaving just before the feeding spell had kicked in the evening before. I prepared the swim during the afternoon, laying down more bait, then packed everything up except the rods, alarms, bait and net. I started getting line bites and very tentative bites, but nothing proper and soon my 24 hours was up and I had to vacate the swim. I learned a lot about the venue's potential, and also about fishing with maggots for larger fish - a technique I'll be using plenty in future.

The Best of my Barbel fishing from last Summer

New Years resolution:  Update my blog more regularly!

Three-quarters of the river season has already flown by since I last wrote, which is extremely slack of me, but hopefully there are still a few people out there interested in reading, so I'll update on how my Summer fishing went and then I plan to do a small post on what I've done since (unfortunately not many fish to write about since November!), by which point I should be back in the habit of writing on here more regularly.

The good news is that the fishing I did over the Summer was generally excellent!  I concentrated on a single river, the Derbyshire Derwent, and on a single species, Barbel.

The regular rain certainly helped this Summer, keeping the levels topped up and keeping the barbel feeding confidently.  So many times in the past 4 or 5 seasons, I've heard anglers moaning - on the bank and on the internet - about the low river levels making barbel fishing difficult.  Personally, I never moaned because I still managed to find a good few fish, but I must say that sport was definitely better this season with a bit of extra water and colour in the system.

I've recently published an article on FishingMagic covering the tactics I employed last year and I have an idea for a magazine feature ready for the beginning of the 2013/14 season too, so I won't cover any of that here but all of the fish were caught using large open-end swimfeeders filled with groundbait, mixed pellets and hemp, in conjunction with long mono hooklengths and a mixture of baits.

As usual, my barbel sessions were short, after-work affairs where I started in daylight but fished on into darkness.  I caught a lot of barbel in the 8 to 10lb bracket, with a few going a bit larger.  I was also very pleased to land a pair of smaller fish though.  People I speak to on the bank have shared my concerns over the seeming lack of small barbel in our local rivers.  Regular floods in the Summers surely haven't helped with recruitment, but there does seem to be a distinct lack of fish below 6lb in the Dove, Derwent and Trent.  So, when I had my first barbel double hook-up, I was glad to see a pristine smallish barbel drop into the net.  After a bit of a struggle I also landed the second barbel without letting the first escape!  What a surprise, after landing nothing even close to this size for quite some time, both fish were like peas in a pod!  Two fish of around the 4lb mark which were obviously of the same year class and probably shoal-mates.  They were both fighting fit and after a quick snap which was sadly blurred by a raindrop on the lens, they were quickly returned to hopefully become the next generation of Derwent heavyweights.  You can now read my article - "A Summer of Barbel" - on Fishing Magic.

 

Double hook-up landed!

Here are some of the best shots of a number of 8-10lb barbel that I landed last Summer:

For the first time I took more than three double-figure barbel in a Summer which, considering that I maybe fit in 15 to 18 sessions averaging 4 hours each, I don't think is bad going.  These fish went 10lb 1oz:

10lb 7oz:

10lb 8oz (which I later realised was a recapture of the fish above, 17 days later):

And to top off the lot, I managed to land myself a new PB!  This fish was landed about an hour before the double hook-up above, from the same swim.  Clearly the larger Derwent fish aren't in such an abundance that they only mix with individuals of a similar size and year class, as these fish must surely have been shoaled together to be caught from the same place in such quick succession.  The fish put up an epic scrap, one that I was sure I would lose at several points, which I've described in the FishingMagic article.  The fish weighed 13lb 1oz and added almost 2lb to my personal best.

Other Species

The only brief distraction I had, in terms of other species, was a couple of very short sessions tench fishing.  I chose to fish with the most simple tactics, and used the Lift Method in the margins to land a few hard-fighting tench.

I also used a centrepin reel on a stillwater for the first time and thankfully landed a fish on it too:

I have another article pending about my trips to Brierley Park Pond, where I caught these tench.

That wraps up the highlights of my Summer captures and my intention is to be back in the next few days to summarise my Autumn & Winter fishing so far.

R.I.P. Terry Lampard

Between me starting to write this post and me publishing it, I was saddened to hear of the sudden passing of one of greatest specimen anglers of all time, Terry Lampard. His captures and achievements over the decades speak for themselves and, having never met him, I can't add much that hasn't already been said elsewhere. What I can say is that he was an inspiration to a great many anglers - myself included - and widely revered & respected. Never one to shout his own praises, Terry was understated and humble, possibly even unaware of just how good an angler he was, or of the number of anglers he inspired.

Terry's death is a very sad loss to angling, but his contribution to specimen fishing over a great many years will ensure he will never be forgotten. My thoughts go out to his family and friends.


Ian Welch has written a brief and eloquent Obituary of Terry Lampard on FishingMagic which explains a little about his life and summarises and some of his captures and achievements.

Spring Tench & Carp Overnighter

I managed to pick a couple of days break in the early-May rain, to fit in a 24-hour session with Shane Calton.  We visited Derbyshire's Higham Farm Lakes and tackled up primarily for tench, but with the head of carp, bream and other species in there, we knew it would be difficult to target them solely.  

Higham is pretty local to me, so I used to fish this place quite regularly for the carp when I was 15 to 18, but I worked out that I have only been there once in the last 12 years!

I was field testing a fair bit of Cyprinus night fishing gear, including a bivvy, a memory foam bedchair, a 3-5 season sleeping bag and a tackle barrow, which all performed superbly (Reviews on FishingMagic.com here).

Before I arrived Shane had already landed a few bream in the 4-5lb bracket and as I was setting up he landed a tench of exactly 5lb, which was a very promising start.

It was to be the last tench we had between us, but we each notched up carp overnight and I also had a bream and a strange fantail brown goldfish-cross thing, which I should have really taken a photograph of, though I have caught similar fish from Higham in the distant past too.  I had one breakage and two hook-pulls in the night, which were either the mothers of all tench, or more likely carp.

 

Overnight I was setup on both rods with 6lb mainline through to 5lb fluorocarbon hooklengths to size 14 Drennan Power Hair Rig hooks.  One rod had a helicopter rig above an open-end feeder and I alternated between corn and meat on this rod whilst on the other rod I rigged up a small method feeder and baited this with a 10mm pineapple & banana pop-up which Shane kindly provided!

 

Just as I was settling into my sleeping bag to get some sleep, the alarm on my margin rod - which had its bait placed just in front of a small bush - screamed out as a fish tried its best to swim between every root before I could lift up the rod.  As soon as I felt the rod I knew I was connected to a decent fish which was a huge worry, what with my 6lb mainline being dragged through the roots!  Thankfully I kept my calm, kept the rod tip underwater and applied steady sideways pressure.  I think the fish had run out of ideas, as one-by-one I felt the line 'ping' off each root, my heart fluttering a little each time as I though it was the hook dislodging.  I gradually felt more in contact with the fish and was able to coax it out into open water where I could tire it without fear of it finding more snags.  Shane did the honours with the net and we both gasped as we realised this fish was a little bigger than either of us expected.  It was a beautiful mirror of exactly 18lb.  My biggest carp for quite some time, although I rarely target them these days.

The following day I alternated between taking photos of the gear I was reviewing and fishing on the surface with this floater rig.  I ended up taking another 3 carp off the top and lost a couple too.

After a pretty terrible winter campaign it felt great to be on the bank catching, in fairly pleasant surroundings (I saw a few buzzards, jays & a treecreeper and had a field mouse visiting my groundbait bowl).  Surface fishing got my juices flowing big-time!  And when I latched into this 14lb common on my last cast, I actually caught myself smiling as the drag slowly "ticked" as the fish took line several minutes into the fight.  This year, for probably the first time ever, I was really glad that the river coarse fishing season was over. There's no hiding from it; since the beginning of November I'd had a real stinker of a season and smiles have been sadly lacking from my fishing for longer than I'm happy to accept.  But if this session was anything to go by, the spark is back and I'm loving my fishing again; at last!

A Couple of Closed-Season Gems

Well, I didn't get fishing too much over the closed season, but two of the more notable sessions were fishing for Crucian carp at Carr Vale Pond near Bolsover and Tench fishing with my friend and erstwhile www.anglerstoday.co.uk editor, Kevin Miles.

I tried fishing light for the crucians, as is normally required to hook one, but for some reason couldn't connect with the bites.  When I eventually swapped to fishing the lift method (which is one of my favourites for close-range fishing) and swimfeeder, I did start hooking fish.  The first came to the lift method on a single grain of corn and it went 1lb 4oz.  Later on, my "sleeper" feeder rod, which I'd loaded with a big hook, a whole lobworm and a grain of corn in the hope of a big tench, was nearly dragged in by an absolute screaming run, which I assumed must be a tench or carp.  After a good scrap for 30 seconds or so, the fish seemed to give up, almost like a bream would.  I brought the fish to the net wondering what on earth I'd hooked.  it turned out to be another, bigger crucian at a PB weight of 1lb 14oz.  It's no Marsh Farm fish, but heck it's not a bad 'un for North Derbyshire!

My two crucians which preferred crude over refined!

On June 2nd I was joined by Kev Miles on a private Midlands reservoir which I'd been lucky enough to secure access to for a day.  It holds some monster tench and with my PB for this species being pretty meagre, I went all-out to try for a big one.  A 5lb+ fish would have been brilliant, but the potential was there for fish up to 9lb!

What a view!  How can an angler fail to be impressed by this!

What a water it was; reed and tree-fringed, weedy, clear and holding big tench - what more could we have asked for?!  It was a baking hot day with clear skies so we spent most of the day sheltering from the sun beneath a brolly.  With the weather so bright and the water so clear, I'm guessing that the tench were similarly seeking refuge deep within the weed cover.  We only had one run during the day, which came to Kev who was using a method feeder over a big bed of groundbait with imitation sweetcorn as hookbait.  The fish managed to embed itself in the weed a couple of times, but without too many nerves wrenched, the fish was landed and weighed 6lb 12oz.  I'd never seen a tench bigger than 5lb before, so I was thrilled to see such a beautiful specimen, which seemed to be spawned out, so may well have been even heavier just a few days before.

The business-end of Kev's Tench

Being late June and being a fan of river fishing, naturally I've been out on the rivers already and I'm pleased to say I've been catching!  I'll be posting news of my best-ever brace of barbel soon...